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Exiles in Bloomsbury

Ruth Scurr

Anna FunderALL THAT I AM320pp. Viking. £18.99.978 0 670 92039 6

Published: 14 September 2011

Photograph:
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A
ll That I Am is Anna Funder’s first novel. Her previous book, Stasiland:
Stories from behind the Berlin Wall (2003), was an important work of
investigative journalism. Funder’s turn to fiction is driven by the desire
to tell the story of her friend Ruth Wesemann. The two women, born over half
a century apart, were friends in Australia, from 1984 (when Funder was
eighteen) until Wesemann’s death in her nineties in 2001. In her youth,
Wesemann was one of many left-wing political activists, writers and
journalists exiled from Germany after 1933.

Funder’s decision to write her friend’s life in the form of a novel, instead
of a conventional biography, resonates with the ethical conviction expressed
in the final pages: “Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion
as holy as any. It is not that people lack imagination, rather that they
stop themselves using it. Because once you have imagined such suffering, how
can you then still do nothing?” All That I Am combines a wealth of archival
research and historical scholarship with an imaginative freedom to inhabit
or revivify other people’s lives.

Once you have imagined such suffering, how can you then still do nothing?
The novel is tightly structured through two alternating first-person
narratives: the reminiscences of Ruth, in advanced old age in Bondi Beach in
2001, and the memories of the playwright Ernst Toller, in New York in 1939.
Both characters, in the year of their deaths, return obsessively to their
memories of Ruth’s cousin, Dora Fabian, and their sense of having betrayed
her. Ruth, reading Toller’s account of the role Dora played in his life,
reflects: “We were the two for whom she was the sun. We moved in her orbit
and the force of her kept us going”.

At the start of the novel, Ruth’s character remembers that on January 30,
1933, from their apartment on the Spreeinsel, the island in the river in the
middle of Berlin, she and her husband, Hans, heard the pulse of the crowd
chanting for Hitler’s first appearance as Chancellor:

“When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room
was turned up loud so Hans could hear it in the kitchen, but all that
drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match. It
was Monday afternoon.”

Ruth recalls unfurling the red flag of her student days from their window that
night; a small symbol of dissidence, past, present and future.

As adolescents, Ruth and her cousin Dora joined the Young Socialists; as young
women they became members of the Independent Social Democratic Party. After
the failed Revolution of 1919, they campaigned for the release of Toller:
their party’s most famous member, a war hero, and the author of Die Wandlung
(1919). When Toller was eventually freed in 1925, having written Masse
Mensch (1921) and much else in prison, he and Dora became lovers. Ruth
meanwhile married Hans, a gifted satirical journalist, who made his name
ridiculing the Nazis in his column. Looking back, Ruth remembers that
Goebbels wrote a novel called Michael (1929), which Hans referred to in
print as “Michael the Ignored”. Goebbels complained that Hans was “fouling
the provinces with the excrement of his sick brain”.

“’Not bad,’ Hans said over eggs at breakfast, ‘excrement of his sick brain.’
We looked at each other across our newspapers. ‘But then again,’ we said,
‘he is, of course, a novelist.’”

Their efforts were surreptitious and secret to protect their rights to reside
in BritainOn the night of the Reichstag Fire, Dora went to Toller’s
flat with Ruth to fill two suitcases with all the manuscripts, diaries and
photographs they could carry. Toller had already left Germany, but his
apartment had not yet been sealed with planks, locks and the notice:
“Contaminated Area. Entry Prohibited”. The next morning, Hitler’s new police
force worked through party lists to arrest or kill Communists and Social
Democrats:

When they found eight communists hiding in a cellar in Mitte they simply
boarded it up. People walking to work heard their calls from the vent at
pavement level but no one dared help. It took two weeks for all the cries to
stop.

Ruth and Hans disguised themselves as tourists and crossed the border into
France, took a boat to Calais and arrived in London. Dora went back to try
to rescue more of Toller’s writings. She was arrested, but through force of
will and intelligence argued her way into being released pending trial.
Police waited at her flat to re-arrest her immediately, but she had already
left for Switzerland en route to London. On April 26, 1933, Goering passed
the first Gestapo law, placing the political police under his personal
control, to circumvent the ordinary rules of criminal procedure. It was
drafted by Dora’s uncle.

In Bloomsbury, the German exiles sought to inform the British press about the
ugly methods underpinning Hitler’s power. Their efforts were surreptitious
and secret to protect their rights to reside in Britain, which were
premissed on the promise not to engage in political activity. Funder quotes
Auden’s translation of Toller’s “No More Peace!” (1935): “Spies in the
bedroom, spies on the roof, / Spies in the bathroom, we’ve got proof”. She
portrays a poisonous atmosphere in which journalism and freedom of speech
had become matters of life and death. Dora, suddenly unsure if she can trust
even her closest friends, starts locking away the paper evidence that
reaches her from Germany in a cupboard in the hall. Toller cannot tell if
the Scotland Yard boy on his tail is there to protect him or to report on
his political activities. Hans misses writing his column, and suspects he is
being left out of his friends’ campaigns; he is “uncomfortable being reduced
to summarizing the news, instead of breaking it”. Ruth is the mildest of
these characters, caught up in their clashes, loyal to them all.

She is a German de Beauvoir: less sex, but more political The
relationship between Dora and Toller recalls that between Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre. Funder makes the comparison explicit when Ruth
fantasizes about what Dora’s life would have been like if she had survived
the war. “She is a German de Beauvoir: less sex, but more political. She
stays in contact with Toller who, despite her best efforts, has taken up
permanent residence in a chamber of her heart, forbidding all others entry
there.” In fact, Dora was killed by the Gestapo in her London flat in Great
Ormond Street in 1935; poisoned, not shot, because Bloomsbury was upset
enough already. Vividly imagining the scene, Ruth asks, “Where do they get
these calm killers from?” The official investigation into the death was a
travesty, and Funder records in her notes that the inquest file is no longer
to be found in archives at Kew. There is only a gutted file, but references
on the front of it suggest that it once contained three volumes, “most
likely destroyed”.

This is a novel full of strong characters and dramatic historical events, yet
it stays steadily focused on the life story of the most recessive character,
Ruth, who is more difficult to portray than her circle of remarkable
acquaintances. Early in her reminiscence, triggered by reading Toller’s
memoir, Ruth remarks:

“It gives me a kind of vertigo, to be inside Toller, looking at Dora. I see
her, and I see at the same time the effect she had on men. Dora was sincere
and straightforward and practical; she never flirted. Because she played no
games, people relaxed with her and felt most fully themselves, as though
there were no difference between their inner and outer lives.”

The subtlety of Anna Funder’s novel is in the elegance of her precise prose,
and in her painstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in
extraordinary events. Toller the brilliant intellectual, Dora the passionate
revolutionary and Hans the egocentric journalist blaze a trail through
Ruth’s life, who then lives on as a vessel of memory in a world of
forgetting: “one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of
others that undoes us”. The meek, modest and unself-serving are the hardest
biographical subjects. Funder has found a way to memorialize Ruth’s
gentleness by telling her life story from an oblique angle. Placing Dora at
the centre of the story, like the sun, allows Funder to capture Ruth in the
shadows. The result is a strong and impressively humane novel: “We don’t
understand one another, we may not ever give each other just what we need.
All that remains, is kindness”.

Ruth Scurr is Fellow and Director of Studies in Politics at Gonville
and Caius College, Cambridge, and the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre
and the French Revolution, 2006.